The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [120]
Perhaps as a result of these habits, Margret came and went without knowing that Asta was much oppressed by the attentions of the young skraeling man. He came every day alone in a fine skin boat, and at first he was content to demonstrate his skills to Asta, she thought for her admiration. He was agile in the skin boat, and capable of great speed and almost magical maneuvers. Of course, she dared not look at them at first, but kept to her work of cheese-making, spinning, and repair of the turf and stonework about the little steading, but in the end it was difficult never to look, for his feats were such as she had never seen before performed by men. And as the devil tempts folk little by little out of the path of the Lord, so these sights tempted Asta Thorbergsdottir first to glance and then to stare and then to come down upon the strand and gaze out into the fjord, where demon and boat together acted like playful fish, leaping in and out of the water, disappearing and reappearing in the waves, shooting from one place to another. At least, so these things appeared to the sight of Asta Thorbergsdottir, but she would not have admitted them to others, for fear of being thought possessed. But even so, when the skraeling approached the shore, Asta had the sense to run up the hillside, and in addition to this, to cast away every gift that the devil left for her, no matter how desirable some little trinket might be, for the fact was that the beauty of such things hid their corrupt nature—were someone to cut open a hunk of whalemeat, for example, such a hunk left as a gift by a demon, one would find it crawling with maggots, and what was more, even gifts not naturally prone to such transformations, a bone needle or a piece of walrus tusk, were transformed by the skraelings into crawling and corrupt objects.
After some days of this, she was willing to admit that the way this corruption came about was not intended by the skraelings themselves, but came as a result of their demon natures. Even so, she resolutely threw everything away and brandished whatever might be in her hand when the skraeling appeared in as threatening a fashion as she could muster. Also, on some days she looked for Sira Isleif to come and relieve her fears, or at least stiffen her resistance against this skraeling, for, say what one wished, she had come to look for his gifts and his antics in the fjord. Life at Steinstraumstead, especially after the winter at Brattahlid, was a solitary undertaking. Other days she feared that Sira Isleif’s visit might be upon them, and that he would castigate her sin in paying any notice to this devil at all, and she turned over in her thoughts what she might say in her own defense, but the fact was, that for deserting the ways of God, even in thoughts, there is no defense. And so she wished away the visit of Sira Isleif on these days.
Margret and Asta were in the habit of arising with the sun to milk the ewes, then eating a bit of dried sealmeat together before Margret drove the animals to their pasture, and on one such morning it came to Asta that she should speak of her distress to the other woman, for she had come far from the days of kicking apart the skraelings’ stone cooking spot, and although she had seen the young woman and the two children only that once, she remembered their faces clearly, but not with the fear or hatred that she remembered feeling at the time. At morning meat she held in her hand a little trinket, a man carved in the skraeling fashion from a bit of ivory, with a few incised lines to depict his parka